Recollections: Jessica Rohrer, Andrew Watel, Daniel Granitto, Brenda Stumpf

For more than a decade the source material for Jessica Rohrer’s work has been her homes and neighborhoods, from her birthplace in Wisconsin to New Jersey where she now lives and works. Often labor intensive, the work deals with ideas of representation, public vs private space, identity, memory, and a desire to control our surrounding environment.

 

Rohrer holds an MFA in painting from Yale University School of Art. She has a BA from Northwestern University and did post-graduate work at the Art Institute of Chicago. She has been awarded multiple residencies including Yaddo, Wave Hill and the Guttenberg Space and Time Residency. Rohrer‘s work is in multiple private collections and has been exhibited throughout the United States since 1998. She has been reviewed in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Art in America, and The New Yorker.  Rohrer lives and works in New Jersey.

 

Andrew Watel grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. He received an undergraduate degree in Painting from The University of California at San Francisco in 1977 and a Master of Fine Art from Yale University in 1983. Upon graduating from Yale, he moved to New York City where he independently pursued painting and teaching. In 1993, as a founding member, he established and developed The Painting Center, an independent non-profit artist run space. He curated several shows there, including the work of such ‘painter’s painters’ as Albert York and Jake Berthot. Twenty-eight years later, The Center remains viable today and offers artists alternative exhibition space. From 2006 until 2017 he taught as an Adjunct Professor of Painting and Illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design. Here he developed his own curricula for beginning and advanced painting and drawing, led seminars and supervised independent projects. In 2018 he moved from New York to Kansas City to pursue painting full time.

 

Daniel M. Granitto returned to his hometown of Lakewood, Colorado in 2016 after living and working in Chicago, Illinois for six years where he received his BFA in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Granitto’s works have been exhibited in galleries and museums spanning the western United States. Daniel currently works out of his home studio in Lakewood where he lives with his wife and two kids.

 

"I make paintings and drawings based on photos that I take as I move through daily life. My approach to subject matter is born out of a practiced disposition of receptivity. That is to say, I pass through the days with my hands open, expectant and ready to receive the gift. The gift is a moment, an event transpiring in real time and space with particular light and air. I have found no formula to predict what factors create these moments. They are unique and surprising. Alert, I wait for these moments. I wait for my seeing to become vision. 

 

Having a direct and personal relationship with the subject is essential for me, which is why I work exclusively from my own photos. However, much of the contextual information that makes any moment so striking is often lost when translated to photograph. For this reason, when painting from these printed photographs, I intentionally set up certain habits and interventions that force me to engage with my memory and imagination instead of relying totally on the photo for visual information.

 

Through my works, I seek to offer an intimate gaze at the uncanny moments of life, when the veil of the ordinary is lifted to reveal the awful (awe-full) reality of being."

-Daniel Granitto

 

Brenda Stumpf (American, b.1972) is a contemporary sculptor and painter. She is a self-taught artist and began exhibiting in the mid-1990s. Stumpf's work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group shows, including The Westmoreland Museum of American Art, The Butler Institute of American Art, the Alexandria Museum of Art, and the Marietta Cobb Museum of Art.

 

In addition, the artist's work has been juried into numerous exhibits by the likes of Jerry Saltz, senior art critic and columnist for New York Magazine; Christoph Heinrich, Director of the Denver Art Museum; Laura Almeida, who was the Curatorial Fellow and Acting Head Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Denver Art Museum; and Kerry Brougher, Curator Emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

 

Stumpf has been awarded a purchase prize from the New Mexico Arts Acclaimed Artist Series, won the Juror's Prize from The Tubac Center of the Arts, and was shortlisted for the Hopper Prize. There are numerous online interviews and printed features in newspapers and magazines, including The Denver Post, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Atlanta Homes & Lifestyles, and Southwest Contemporary. Stumpf's art resides in over 350 private collections throughout the United States and abroad. Originally from Parma, Ohio, the artist lives near Denver, Colorado.